31 August 2016

25 august: a great start for my holiday was the new look for the walk to the B concourse at the airport ---- i'm not sure of the material, but it's meant to suggest "the city in the woods," atlanner --- complete with little gaps of blue sky and buzzards or something flying around --- but i still hate it that they've taken down the fire ants at baggage claim, which have been an icon of the 21st century airport experience

20 August 2016

i'm really a little surprised they're moving forward with this, given all the apts and condos already underway and coming on line this year and next, but the company has filed for a building permit --- peachtree will have one less surface parking lot and midtown will have several hundred more residents --- we're running out of vacant land, which is a very good thing after all these years

and if "the stitch" is actually completed, restoring the street grid and all, it would be one of the more wonderful things for atlanta in a long time

18 August 2016

travel could be tough in the nineteenth century, this account from 1886:

And, to deal with all of the horrible things at once,
it was in Clarksville that we heard of a gentle Athenian, who was boarding in
the north-eastern section of the State, and being called by a coloured servant
early in the morning, she ventured to lie a little longer; whereupon she received
a peremptory order to get up, as "the missis wants one of the sheets for a
tablecloth."

11 August 2016

a weird day: half-way through war and peace, got a call from an old client with what appears to be good work, got a check from the n'er-do-well client, had one of my best friends and her boyfriend over for happy hour --- and broke my little finger emptying goddam ice trays

i love retirement

this guy has been posting poems around the neighborhood ---

the building on the right is underway, but i can't see it from my unit --- the one on the left will be a nice addition to the viewshed, especially at sunrise

03 August 2016

broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime― mark twain

truly, what of good

ever have prophets brought to men?

craft of many words,

only through

evil your message speaks.

seers bring aye

terror, so to keep

men afraid.

―

aeschylus

he cannot be a gentleman which loveth not a dog.

john northbrooke, c. 1570

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

john stuart mill in a letter to conservative mp sir john pakington (march 1866)